The 1,000-Book Reich

By Mayo Mohs

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER

by ROBERT PAYNE

623 pages. Praeger. $12.95.

The Third Reich, Adolf Hitler promised, would last a thousand years. Those who deal in historical ironies have long enjoyed pointing out that it lasted only twelve. Or did it? Once again, a spate of new books on Hitler and his era are setting bookstore shelves abloom with the inevitable swastikas and Chaplinesque mustaches. The 1,000-book Reich--recollected in tranquillity--must surely be near at hand.

The most ballyhooed of the new arrivals is Robert Payne's pop biography, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has reissued Hitler's Secret Conversations ($19), the Fuehrer's wartime table talk (from Volkswagens to the Virgin Birth) that all Hitler biographers have acknowledged as an invaluable source. Among the others, just published or to come, are books ranging from the thoughtful to the frivolous. Helmut von Moltke (St. Martin's Press; $16.95) introduces a Roman Catholic nobleman who triples as an international lawyer and anti-Hitler leader, and who, like Protestant Dietrich Bonhoeffer, paid for his resistance with his life. Without overplaying their hand, Authors Michael Balfour and Julian Frisby make Von Moltke something of a prophet, so concerned with disturbing trends toward materialism and impersonal technocracy that he remains a relevant critic today.

Slothful. There is also more in the endless procession of campaign histories, represented this season by a capable but rather specialized volume, Nazi Victory: Crete 1941. And of course, one genuine clunker, priced at $6.95, from Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Called Hitler's Last Days, it is the brief but mesmerizingly dull memoir of a minor staff officer named Gerhard Boldt, who, as it turns out, constructs Hitler's very last days from already published sources--since he was not there.

Payne, to his credit, does something more than that. A relentless biographer (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi), he tackled his present subject without benefit of any fresh interviewing, but with the kind of wide-eyed zest that produces a sort of Boy's Life of Genghis Khan. There goes the youthful, effervescent Adolf trotting off to school at the local Benedictine Abbey at Lambach and passing by an old abbot's pet insignia, the swastika.* Here he comes, voraciously reading the latest sauerkraut western by Bavarian Author Karl May, whose genocidal hero Old Shatterhand was busy exterminating the insidious "Ogellelah" Indians. From Payne's researches in the New York Public Library come telling excerpts from the unpublished memoirs of Hitler's sister-in-law, Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, especially tantalizing glimpses of the impoverished, slothful future Fuehrer in his early 20s, frittering away six months in Bridget's Liverpool home.

If Payne's book has any special value, it is as a sort of two-inch shelf of Hitleriana, including slightly disproportionate swatches of material from August Kubizek, Hitler's youthful friend in Linz, the usual excerpts from Mein Kampf, and a selection of good illustrations, among them some of the drawings done by Adolf the failed artist. Life and Death is overburdened with amateur psychoanalysis--especially vulnerable from a writer who sometimes seems not to have read the important wartime Office of Strategic Services report, part of which was published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler.

Another new Hitler book, to be published in June, is Horst von Maltitiz's scholarly The Evolution of Hitler's Germany (McGraw-Hill; $12.50), which examines the whole narcissistic era of German history bracketed by the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War II. The epoch was one of paranoiac suspicion, which turned Germany inward toward its own bravado traditions and Ubermensch philosophy.

Something far more banal was also at play, however--an invincibly ignorant pride. One of the saddest of the new books is called Against Stalin and Hitler (John Day; $8.95). The author, a former Eastern Front officer named Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt tells how the advancing Germans failed to enlist the struggling Russian Liberation Movement in their assault on Stalin's forces.

It is true that in some areas of the U.S.S.R. local nationalists did greet the Germans as potential liberators. But Strik-Strikfeldt's sketches of the conquering Germans restoring abandoned churches as they went and winning the huzzahs of the downtrodden populace is an astonishingly ingenuous view of the Nazi war machine. As late as 1941, he insists, Hitler had "the opportunity to refashion Europe on a basis of freedom, justice and equality." That is like saying that the jaguar, in mid-attack, could change into an antelope--and it explains much about German naivete. Anyone who could believe that could believe anything. Mayo Mohs

*Payne offers this as the inspiration of the Nazi insignia. But the ancient symbol, common in Germanic countries, had been used by other right-wing groups well before Hitler.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.